Cyberattack and process safety: Lessons from industrial disasters

Le résumé fourni par la source

Abstract Historical process safety incidents in the Chemical Process Industries constitute a well‐documented record of failure modes, escalation pathways, and systemic vulnerabilities that extend well beyond their original mechanical or procedural causes. This study examines 122 notable industrial incidents from 1980 to 2025 across the refinery, petrochemical, gas processing, and bio‐process industries and demonstrates how these historical events can inform the development of cyberattack scenarios in modern digitally integrated facilities. The scenario mapping methodology is grounded in the US Department of Energy's Cyber‐Informed Engineering Framework Principle 8 calls on engineers to systematically hypothesize how digital functions could be abused or misused to cause harm, and to use those exploitation pathways to drive both digital and engineered mitigations. By applying this principle to the historical process safety record, selected incidents are mapped to realistic cyber‐physical attack scenarios involving sensor spoofing, alarm suppression, safety instrumented system bypass, and audit trail manipulation. Although these incidents were not originally caused by cyberattacks, their initiating conditions and escalation mechanisms present credible exploitation pathways in today's threat landscape. This work advances cyber awareness among process engineers, safety professionals, and plant operators, and reinforces the need to integrate cybersecurity considerations into established hazard analysis and risk management frameworks.

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